A Local and Private Microblog using Laconica

Staying up-to-date to your friends' activities can be so easy today with microblog services like Twitter and Plurk. A microblog is quite similar to a weblog except that users enter their entries in at most 140 characters. It forces users to write shortly but often. These services allow users to share multimedia clips and Internet sites easily. Although community interactions using these services can be useful and fun, some people prefer to blog privately (perhaps they tend to express easily and openly). While users are given the choice to make their timelines or pages entirely private, having a local, offline, and private microblog in your own PC is another option.
After setting up my local web server + MySQL + PHP, I evaluated some open source microblog platforms written in PHP. I found Laconica a popular choice among users, and even after viewing other platforms, it remains my best choice. It offers the basic functionalities and implementations of a microblogging service like posting, tagging, messaging, joining groups, viewing timelines, replying to posts, customizing profile, and searching for posts and friends. Aside from the features, here are some advantages of Laconica:

1. It's easy to install and it's quite similar to how Wordpress' install process.


2. It's easy to use. The layout and design is simple, elegant, and intuitive.


3. It's popular. There are websites that are running Laconica as their company or site's microblog. A perfect example is Identi.ca , a free and online microblog alternative to Twitter, which was also created by Laconica developers.


4. If you have Twitter or other popular microblog accounts, then Laconica can also communicate with them easily for you.


5. Future developments like plugins, themes, and other features are also being worked on. It's a promising and active project we can rely on.

The only problem I found was the conflict between Aprelium Abyss Web Server, but editing two lines of codes should be easy. Apache users won't encounter the same issues. By the way, Laconica uses the <? ... ?> shorthand rather than the conventional <?php ... ?>, so I just turned on the short_open_tag (setting it to true). Abyss' $_SERVER variable is much different with Apache's, I think Laconica was not tested on Abyss. I encountered zero issues during install, but visiting the index page and any links inside the home page would give me the Unknown page or Page Not Found errors. Opening index.php of the Laconica root folder, and editting the $_SERVER line in the getPath function fixed my problem:

else if (array_key_exists('PATH_INFO', $_SERVER)) {
return substr($_SERVER['URL'],strpos($_SERVER['URL'],".php/")+5);
}

Based on my tests using Apache, the return value has something to do with the "query" or "end" prt of the path. So I just made a workaround to produce the same return value.

The Readme.txt located in the folder is a very easy and useful document. I also customized some parameters in the config.php after following the installation procedure. I created my account, turned off registration and set my microblog as closed/private. I made my first few posts and I just love Laconica. I just hope that the edit notice/post function will be present in the future.

Visit Laconica!